Humming and buzzing house

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GerryB

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woodbridge, ct. USA
I just had a call from a customer who wanted to know if I could help her. She has an old house that I have done some work in and also upped the service to 200 amp a few years ago. She says there is a humm or buzz throughout the house, loud enough to bother her sleeping at night. She says she cannot pinpoint anything. She was asking me about EMF's. I just read an old post about them and didn't read anything about symptoms that would indicate you had high levels in your wiring. Could the buzz have anything to do with EMF's? Any other thoughts. I told her the obvious things that could electrically buzz or humm but she says it is all over the house. On a side note she lives at the end of the runway at an airport big enough for small jets.
 
GerryB said:
I just had a call from a customer who wanted to know if I could help her. She has an old house that I have done some work in and also upped the service to 200 amp a few years ago. She says there is a humm or buzz throughout the house, loud enough to bother her sleeping at night. She says she cannot pinpoint anything. She was asking me about EMF's. I just read an old post about them and didn't read anything about symptoms that would indicate you had high levels in your wiring. Could the buzz have anything to do with EMF's? Any other thoughts. I told her the obvious things that could electrically buzz or humm but she says it is all over the house. On a side note she lives at the end of the runway at an airport big enough for small jets.
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Can you hear it? Or if you haven't been there to check, do you know what is in and around her house (beside the runway)? Here's why.

"Humming" is vibration. For "EMF in the wiring" to cause detectible vibration in a residential structure, the energy would have to be so incredibly powerful that the wiring would not contain it, the house would be a small pile of ashes. So right off the bat, don't go down that road.

Most likely there is a transformer somewhere near her, and it is either new (to her) or beginning to fail. Another possibility could be a failing solenoid coil on something that runs continuously in her house (that's why I asked if you knew everything that is in there), but usually that ends up being more localized and can be traced by moving around to where it gets louder. If the entire house is "humming", then it's likely something coming up from the ground.

To give you an example, I have a PoCo sub station about a block away from me on the other side of a creek, with a road and a park between us. About twice a year, the soil conditions are just right to where I can hear the transformer hum coming up through the floor, 24/7. It typically lasts for a few days at most, once it lasted for a month. But once it rains or it dries out and the soil conditions change beyond the narrowly specific conditions it took to conduct those vibrations, it ceases. So in her case, let's say the airport has some taxiway lighting installed, which has constant current transformers for them, usually in underground vaults. it might be that something has changed recently which allows the vibration from the nearest transformer to transmit its mechanical harmonic under her house. it might also be that it has always been there and the transformer is getting old, so it is noticeable now.

Bottom line, look for real tangible causes, don't buy into the hype that surrounds most "EMF hypersensitivity" claims.
 
I had a similar problem. It was the doorbell transformer. It was mounted loosely to a box in the basement ceiling and pressed against a floor joist. It would randomly start and stop buzzing.

When it did buzz, the vibrations would seem to carry through the floor, and it was very loud in both the basement and 1st floor. I could even hear it on the second floor since it was mounted under the open stairway up to the 2nd floor.

Edit: It was a simple fix: space box away from the joist so the transformer wasn't pressing against the joist, and tighten mounting hardware.
 
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Jraef said:
Can you hear it? Or if you haven't been there to check, do you know what is in and around her house (beside the runway)? Here's why.

"Humming" is vibration. For "EMF in the wiring" to cause detectible vibration in a residential structure, the energy would have to be so incredibly powerful that the wiring would not contain it, the house would be a small pile of ashes. So right off the bat, don't go down that road.

Most likely there is a transformer somewhere near her, and it is either new (to her) or beginning to fail. Another possibility could be a failing solenoid coil on something that runs continuously in her house (that's why I asked if you knew everything that is in there), but usually that ends up being more localized and can be traced by moving around to where it gets louder. If the entire house is "humming", then it's likely something coming up from the ground.

To give you an example, I have a PoCo sub station about a block away from me on the other side of a creek, with a road and a park between us. About twice a year, the soil conditions are just right to where I can hear the transformer hum coming up through the floor, 24/7. It typically lasts for a few days at most, once it lasted for a month. But once it rains or it dries out and the soil conditions change beyond the narrowly specific conditions it took to conduct those vibrations, it ceases. So in her case, let's say the airport has some taxiway lighting installed, which has constant current transformers for them, usually in underground vaults. it might be that something has changed recently which allows the vibration from the nearest transformer to transmit its mechanical harmonic under her house. it might also be that it has always been there and the transformer is getting old, so it is noticeable now.

Bottom line, look for real tangible causes, don't buy into the hype that surrounds most "EMF hypersensitivity" claims.
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Thanks for that reply. I haven't been there yet. Just checked my records and the service was done in 09 and I recall the airport was doing some kind of work at that time involving digging up the street on the side of her house, might have been a runway expansion. I think they also put up a new fence on the border of her property. She and her husband moved in at that time. While they had me do the service there was a lot of other electrical done by the slam bang remodeler and his one armed brother. (I'm not making that up!) So there could very well be EMF's all over the place if grounds touching neutrals and neutrals from different circuits tied together are the cause. But like you say the hum would be vibration. I was also going to suggest to her she ask her neighbors if they have anything like that.
 
If bees, I would expect them to quiet down at night. I have never had that situation, but I have had over a hundred hives of bees in my barn, for a couple of days. Almost too loud during the day, dead quiet in the cold morning.

Turn off all the breakers and see if the sound ends.

I believe the sound can also be transmitted through sewer pipes if there is a lift station nearby.
 
I did a service call last year, same complaint, hum/buzzing in the house.

After two hours, traced it to the master bedroom 4 poster bed. Listening with a stethoscope, we found an expensive Bulova watch, which uses a tuning fork to keep accurate time, against the head board. The tuning fork in the watch was vibrating the bed, like a piano when a key is struck.

Put the watch in a sock: no more hum.

Got a nice Yelp write up for that one:

6/18/2013
For the past six weeks, we have had a bothersome consistent low hum - which sounded like a transformer going bad in our bedroom - in the wall right behind the headboard of our bed. It was a low hum that, at first, you might not notice. BUT at night it was so noticeable that I could not sleep in our bedroom.

We unplugged everything in our bedroom and took out the LED lights we'd recently put in but still, the hum. We had our contractor come out twice, his electrician came out, too. They checked the attic. They turned off the central breaker to the house and still we had this hum. They could not figure it out. We had a friend that's an electrician/handyman come out - just because he was curious - and he couldn't figure it out. We talked to the solar panel folks, we talked to the folks that put in our whole house audio system. We had our two brilliant neighbors (astro physicist and computer genius) come over and they sat around for 45 minutes, conjecturing that somehow it was coming from outside and resonating in the wall. We had the pest control folks come out.

I was ready to rip out the wall to find this problem. Someone suggested Andy Cook of Cook Electric. I called him last week, explained the situation and was surprised that he was able to come early Monday morning. Andy arrived with two very nice respectful young men. They were super aware of putting on shoe covers to keep the house clean and they went to work. Andy had a stethoscope and some sort of sound detection device. They heard the noise and began to try and identify WHERE it was coming from. They pulled the bed out. They listened to the wall, they went down to the kitchen where they could hear it, too. They turned off the electricity and they could still hear it. This went on for a full hour.

Finally, one of the young men put the stethoscope on the bed and swore that it was IN THE BED. They immediately lifted this massive bed up and slid towels under the base. The sound was IN the bed. Andy immediately began to look under the mattresses, pillows, etc, and he found ....... my husband's 1960 Bulova Accutron Spaceview watch that had dropped down between the mattress and the headboard. It has a tuning fork that hums at 360 hertz. It was pressing against the headboard which amplified the sound!

I'm so happy to be sleeping in my own bed again! Thanks to Andy and his awesome team!
 
Few random words:

A grounded neutral, or crossed neutrals, will produce elevated magnetic fields that can cause electronic equipment, primary audio, to put out a hum or buzzz. My understanding is these EMF do not cause an actual audio hum in the human ear. The can cause wires to rattle in a conduit... but that's it.



A doorbell transformer in the attic could be doing it as well as one for a security system.



Any electrical utility equipment outside the home?



Large underground natural as line from compressor stations can sometimes do it.
 
Turn off breakers one at a time and see which one stops the noise. If none stop it, turn off the main. If it's still there, blame somebody else or get the POCO out to do some investigating. Most have directional detectors to determine audible and electrical noise.
 
GerryB said:
I just had a call from a customer who wanted to know if I could help her. She has an old house that I have done some work in and also upped the service to 200 amp a few years ago. She says there is a humm or buzz throughout the house, loud enough to bother her sleeping at night. She says she cannot pinpoint anything. She was asking me about EMF's. I just read an old post about them and didn't read anything about symptoms that would indicate you had high levels in your wiring. Could the buzz have anything to do with EMF's? Any other thoughts. I told her the obvious things that could electrically buzz or humm but she says it is all over the house. On a side note she lives at the end of the runway at an airport big enough for small jets.
Click to expand...

I had a similar issue a few years ago, but only in my bedroom. It was a hive of bees that had moved into the space over the eaves over a window.
 
I had the bees too, but it did stop at night. Nobody was home during the day, so we only heard it for a few hours after work, but with little kids at home making noise, only occasionally even then so I though it was something in the refrigerator. I found out about the bees when my dog started yelping in pain in the middle of the night in the kitchen. I ran down stairs with my gun, flipped on the light, and there were a dozen baby (not able to fly yet) bees crawling on the floor, the dog had stepped on one. They were coming from a baseboard heater. Opened it up and they were crawling through the hole made by the hack job installer (the house was 100 years old and had been oil heat, converted to electric in maybe the 60s). I plugged the hole to get some sleep, then found the beehive the next day. They had entered through an old aboandoned exterior knife switch box that had been flush mounted into the siding, likely from when the house was first electrified. I had nailed the cover closed as a temporary measure (5 years earlier), but a rusted corner became a tiny hole and the Queen bee had found it. Had to remodel the kitchen after that because removing that old panel and getting to the hive left a gaping hole inside and out.

I get asked to look at electrical problems by friends all the time, I usually refuse and give them referrals. But it's hard to say no to at least just take a look during a BBQ party, so one time I agreed to find a humming sound. It was an "adult toy" as previously mentioned, they have never asked me again...
 
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